Mario Kart DS.

Shit’s a masterpiece.

My company finishes at 4. 3:56 every day I clock out so I can get out of the yard before everyone else and not get stuck in traffic.

My mama didn’t raise no fools. Well, apart from my little brother.

Connected to this: Bluetooth headphones do not need, and never needed, a flashing LED while they’re in use. I would regulate this harshly.

So Ee-van-guh-lion, yes?

Podcasting

I love listening to podcasts, but almost never the ones that everyone goes on about. I like ones made by people with a passion for storytelling, or ones that serve as people’s journals, y’know?

I’ve made my own podcasts over the past 15 years or so, but a few years back I gave up. The barrier to entry lowering so sharply meant an influx of them, making it basically impossible to get mine heard. So I’d spend 8/10 hours making my 15 minute episodes sound as perfect as I could for them to get 5 listens. I tried to tell myself that I was doing it for me, but ultimately I wanted people to hear my efforts.

So I got burned out and at some point just abandoned the whole thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful that anyone can pick up their phone and bang out a professional sounding piece of audio, but between that and the likes of Spotify throwing cash at the already big names, it became impossible to stand out without having your own marketing budget.

I’ll never forget when the internal speaker went on my first iPhone, a 3GS. I put off getting it repaired because I was so used to having to send my previous Nokias and HTCs back and being without my phone for a couple of weeks. But the warranty was about to expire, so I bit the bullet and booked an appointment to get it sorted.

Walked in to the appointment and walked out ten minutes later with a brand new phone.

That sold me on Apple’s customer support.

I will say though, that the support seems to have tanked over the past few years. That they’ll jump on any blemishes on the device as a reason to not honour the warranty. Like how the screen in my XR had a tiny burn right at the edge (I was a welder at the time and stupidly had it in the top pocket of my overalls), which they used as reason to not work on it when it kept freezing. They demanded I pay £150 for a replacement screen first, which I refused, so they returned it to me. They’d taken off the screen protector, so I then had to argue with them for weeks to get them to replace it.

Shimano really should have turned to shit, what with them effectively having a monopoly (in mountain biking certainly) for literally decades. I don’t know whether it’s a Japanese thing or what, but they never did. Just kept quietly putting out decent gear at a variety of price ranges.

I picked up a full set of XTR v-brakes from eBay a few years back. Those things were still as good as the day they were new, despite being old enough that I only paid £20 for the lot.

I got so sad when I picked up some Airwalks a few years ago, only for them to fall apart pretty quickly. Turns out they’d been bought out by some branding firm who had licensed the name out to whoever wanted to make them on the cheap. So yeah, Airwalks used to be one of the big names in skateboarding shoes with Vans and DC, and now they’re dog shit.

I like how Hilti and Makita own… Hilti and Makita.

Sennheiser

Just FYI, Sennheiser’s consumer audio department got bought out a few years ago. I can’t say as to whether that has affected the quality of their products, but brands being purchased rarely works in their favour.

I’m a Sony kid these days.

Massive shame. Those characters are ripe for it. C’mon BBC, get to it!

Relevant XKCD

I’d like to see any adaptations of any of the Watch books. Any at all.

I used to have a pair. Tried to use them on a train and ended up wishing I also had earplugs.

It’d be interesting to see if you could install the Steamdeck’s OS on a Steam Machine.

I put Linux Mint on mine. It’s like a brand new laptop. Incredible hardware.

I had the same 2015 MBP, and honestly the only reason I sold it was because I was gifted an M2 Air. For the £400 I paid for it, it’s an incredible laptop.

Yes, Apple have become a steaming tower of shitheads, but fuck me, their hardware is (generally) incredibly well built.

I have a 2011 13” MacBook Pro that I bumped up to 16gb RAM, and replaced the DVD drive with a second hard drive. I had it running Sonoma through OCLP until a few weeks ago when I threw Linux Mint on it. Damn thing won’t die. Same for the 2011 and 2014 Macs mini that I also use regularly. I also have a 15” M2 Air, which is legitimately the best computer I’ve ever owned. I don’t imagine I’ll get the same life out of that, not with macOS at least. Asahi Linux seems to be very, very promising though.

I have a Lamy pen and it’s wonderful. I put a more fine nib on it and it writes beautifully, despite me being a lefty. I know you can get a lefty nib for them, but can’t really justify buying one and they only come in medium width.

The trouble with the movie was that the studio got scared out of continuing by fundamentalist Christian groups who really objected to the central premise of the books; namely that God can be killed and all life will be better off for it.

They then fumbled the shit out of it, editing it so poorly that what they did make was a jumble of shit that no one who wasn’t familiar with the stories would care to see, and no one who loved the books would be happy with. For me it was shit like revealing Lyra’s parentage right at the beginning, rather than it being a huge surprise as in the books.

It was a massive shame though, because the casting was damn near perfect. If they’d got Sam Elliott back to reprise the role of Lee Scorseby for the BBC adaptation, I’d have been as happy as a pig in shit. To my mind he is Lee. Lin Manuel Miranda was fine, but lacked the essential taciturn nature of the character as written. And Sir Ian McKellan as Iorek? Perfect.